Not when you have to get out of bed. Not when you have to step into a meeting. It’s when the clock strikes, signaling time for you to sleep.

As you crawl into bed, you wonder if things will be different. Will you shut your eyes and finally fall into slumber? Or will you once again stare at the ceiling, waiting until you drift asleep? If it’s the latter, you’re likely to end up exhausted the next morning, even though you went to bed early.

There are numerous reasons why we have difficulty falling asleep. Sometimes, it’s psychological. Other times, it’s due to the stresses that life cruelly throws at us. But what about our dietary habits?

We carefully plan out our diets to energize ourselves, trim our figures, and improve our overall health. Yet, the substances we ingest take a secondary role when it comes to sleep.

“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

Once in a while, we sit down and try to figure out what we need to start doing. We ponder our past actions and their results, where we are right now, and what we should do next.

While these are logical steps to take, we neglect the fact that putting more things into our lives means we have to take out other components. After all, we only have so much time and energy in the day. And in order to make space for what we want to do, we need to discard our bad habits first.

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” — Confucius

Overload has become the norm.

Every single day, we’re barraged with copious amounts of information. We’re told how we should spend our time, what we should eat, and where we should go. While we search endlessly for the answer, we usually end up where we began: in a bottomless well.

When you add in factors such as the rise of automated technology, increasing choices, and the pressure to keep up, is it any wonder that we feel swallowed up in everything?

The problem with these phrases is that they assume people can simply build up courage on their own to achieve their goals. It makes us think that if we just put in the effort and try hard enough, we can become confident.

Sometimes it’s hard to notice when we’re stuck in a rut. You could go through the dull, numbing pain of everyday activities and not feel any desire to change anything. After all, as humans we have the amazing ability to adapt and cope with nearly any situation.

The downside though, is that we get used to things that make us unhappy. Ideas or places we used to resist eventually become the same things we cling onto, not out of need or want, but out of familiarity.

And you would be right. But there’s a right way to breathe and a few ways you might be breathing ineffectively. Chances are, you might not be breathing properly.

Over time, you breathe a certain way. It can either be by inhaling too much air, taking shallow breaths, or unknowingly holding your breath. The way you breathe eventually becomes something you do as a habit.

Is the way you breathe just getting you by, or are you breathing in a way that optimizes how you work and perform?